The present invention relates to a general industrial field such as a traffic control system, a crime prevention monitoring system, a large scale full automation (FA) system, and the like using an image recognizing technique and, more particularly, to a distributed image recognizing system which is suitable for integration of image recognizing systems which are distributed and arranged at remote locations.
In general, an image recognizing system recognizes an image which is picked up by a television camera (ITV) and outputs control data to a processing unit in accordance with an object on the basis of the result of the image recognition process. A conventional example of such a system is the "Hitachi General Image Recognizing Analyzing System HIDIC-IP Series" (disclosed in, "Hardware Manual", published on September, 1984).
When such a system is applied to an application field such that a plurality of measuring points (positions to be measured) are distributed, for instance, in a system for monitoring a traffic flow at a street intersection, as disclosed in the literature of, "Development of Image Processing Type Traffic Flow Instrumentation System at Street Intersection", Sumitomo Electric Industries, Vol. 130, pages 26 to 32, March, 1987, a plurality of fetching ports of ITVs are provided. Images from the plurality of ITVs are switched by a multiplexer or the like, and are processed by a single image recognizing system.
Such a system construction can be applied only when the measuring points are distributed over a narrow range. Such a system construction is not well suited when measuring points are distributed over a wide range, due to processing performance and operability. Therefore, in the fields where measuring points are distributed over a wide region, on the order of a few kilometers, such as
i) traffic flow instrumentation system for spatially monitoring a flow of vehicles on a freeway, national road, or the like, PA1 ii) crime/disaster prevention monitoring system of factories, buildings, and the like which are distributed in each district, PA1 iii) large scale FA system for realizing integrated automatization of assembly, check, conveyance, and the like of products, and the like,
an independent image recognizing system is assigned to each measuring point as shown in FIG. 2.
FIG. 2 is a diagram showing a state in which image recognizing systems 11, 21, and 31 are assigned to three measuring points A, B, and C, respectively.
Although the image recognizing systems 11, 21, and 31 are similarly constructed, since the instrumentation environments may differ at the respective measuring points, it may be necessary to individually tune the image recognizing systems.
The tuning processes are set for the measuring area, measuring conditions, object to be measured, and the like. The tuning processes may be executed by operators who are specifically allocated to each image recognizing system or a group of a few operators may go to all of the measuring points which are distributed to each district and execute the tuning processes.
In the above techniques, no consideration is paid to industrial field applications of the device where many measuring points are distributed at remote locations. The need for many operators and a long time are required to operate such image recognizing systems distributed through various districts are problems of the above techniques.
It is an object of the present invention to improve the operability of image recognizing systems which are distributed to respective districts and to reduce the number of operators and the operating time which are required for the operations.